Google Plus after a week – at best, a “may be”


I am certainly not one of the folks who jump in with both feet at every new technology that shows up on the radar. I like to stay back and watch others play with a little, read their reviews and then slowly dip my toes to see if it works for me.  I was totally planning to take the same approach with Google Plus. And that is when Dennis Howlett told me he thinks it is pretty cool, and that I should try it. I take Dennis seriously all the time, and decided to give it a try. I also got a second invite from my id to do some sandbox work without annoying my real friends.

First problem was to get signed in. This thing wouldn’t let me in unless someone invited me. And Alex Williams was kind enough to send me one. Signing in was not a big issue at all – I clicked on a few buttons and filled in my name etc and I was ready to go.

First up – Google wanted me to share Picassa albums. If I said no – google won’t let me sign up. Not a good thing in my opinion, but personally not a big deal since I use Kodak Gallery for my photos.  Lets just say the first step left a bad taste in my mouth. Of course you can limit access to your photos by playing with security settings – but why bother if I just didnt want to share my albums to begin with?

It looks to me that I can follow any one without their consent by adding them to my circle – like twitter, and unlike facebook.  Circles are not difficult to get – kind of similar to groups in facebook, or lists in twitter. Unlike twitter – no one else will know if I put you in the “dumb morons” circle.

Google plus privacy settings are going through what facebook settings went through in the past. It is straight forward to limit who can see your posts,  but kind of convoluted to prevent further sharing by people in your circle.

If you are a user of other services from google like mail or calendar, all those things are easily accessible. So that is a definite plus.

Facebook is obviously watching Google plus carefully – they have also announced skype group chats including video.  In a way – Facebook with 750 million users can probably outsmart google plus even if they just ape every cool thing google plus does. At the end, google plus is the one who has to catch up – and facebook which has a huge number of users across the globe, should be able to make use of its strong incumbent status to advantage.

For a company whose name is synonymous with search, google does not allow users to search in google plus. Isn’t that kind of backwards? It is like playbook not allowing you to use calendar and email without tethering a blackberry to it. Is that some kind of new thinking ? it could also simply be me not seeing how to use search in the limited time I test drove this.

Of course you can email people with Gmail – but why wouldn’t this allow me to send a message directly to one person in my circle? Is that kind of hard to build? Of course you can create a post and filter it to make sure only one person sees it. But that is not good design, is it?

Google had wave and buzz both of which had several geeks interested. Some companies even went so far as to build prototypes to integrate with it. Well, we know what happened – neither captured popular attention. Wave is officially dead too. So with this history, Google has a lot of baggage to shed before general public uses Google plus. This was also one of the reasons I shied away from this before Dennis nudged me to try. Google is not apple – it does not have the cool factor to pull off something just by brand name.

I saw something on twitter that google plus might soon get an IPhone and IPad app. In 2011 July, why would they go to pre-beta or whatever it is called without a mobile app?

There are no third party hello world apps there – no games, no nothing. I don’t miss it – but knowing how many people are in facebook strictly because of farmville, it is kind of hard for me to imagine there is nothing in Google plus to match. Or is it a way to tell the world “we are so cool that we don’t need to do everything facebook does?”. Why wouldn’t Google bring in google apps in here right upfront?Especially if they have enterprise ambitions.

I could see a way to get hotmail and yahoo contacts to Google plus, I couldn’t see a way to download from facebook. I am pretty sure I could get twitter feeds to integrate with Buzz. So why not with google plus? Or is it hidden somewhere? That surprised me a lot.

I did not particularly like sparks – I could not find a way of using what I have already set up on google reader via sparks. Why would I do it in two places? Not cool.

Hangouts is a pretty neat idea – but then facebook will reproduce it via skype integration, so no added edge there.

Bottom line : What is the point of a pre-beta when you can guess 9 out of 10 people will provide the feedback that all these things are expected as a minimum?

Probably because it is in trial version – there is no nuisance from advertisements. I guess that would change. As long as it doesn’t get in my face, I can live with it. However, I have an uneasy feeling about google keeping an eye on who I am friends with 🙂

I saw some well respected analyst friends of mine terming Google plus as “disruptive” and “enterprise class”.  Most of the reasoning seem to be along the lines of how pundits told us how Wave  will change how business processes work in future . After all I have described above, I find it hard to agree .  Well, if they mean it as a future dream – sure, that is possible. At the moment, it is not enterprise worthy in my opinion. Forget “facebook for enterprise” for now – it needs to mature a lot more. And for long term viability in enterprise – facebook equivalency is just tablestakes. If facebook for enterprise is the vision – i would give facebook the most chance of making it, and not google plus.  Duh !

There is however one potential use case where Google can make a difference – as the one place that unifies all kinds of information an enterprise user needs, on the cloud, with appropriate security settings. It is not easy to pull off – but if they do, they can probably make a killing.  Well, either that or some one else will integrate everything including Google Plus. If Google is smart – no reason to think other wise – they would not let this opportunity pass by.

Last thought – just like “old generation” enterprisey companies find it hard to understand the business model of  “new generation” consumery companies , I think the new guys have the same problem in reverse too.

As for me – at the moment, I am going to park Google plus. I will test drive again after some time to see if  something has changed. But meanwhile, I will be following its progress from what rest of the world says.

India’s sports awards – time to change at least the names ?


Of course Cricket is the big dog – and cricketers earn more money and fame than every one else in sports in India. Field hockey probably is next in demand, since India occasionally shows sparks of brilliance. Then there is a variety of other things like athletics, swimming, tennis etc where  India tries hard, but generally with limited success.

But despite the lack of glory in international arena – India has always had government sponsored awards for its sports persons – players and coaches. The top three being Rajeev Gandhi Khel Ratna, Arjuna award for players and Drona award for coaches.  Rajeev Gandhi – though I don’t know if he was accomplished in sports or not, was India’s Prime Minister, and probably an award in his name can be justified for his work as an administrator who supported sporting events.

But I do wonder what is the rationale for naming awards after to characters from Hindu Mythology who never stood up for the right thing.

Let us start with Dronacharya – the guy who taught martial arts to both Pandavas (popularly believed to be the good guys) and Kauravas (the bad guys). This is the man, who asked the tribal boy Ekalavya to donate his thumb as tuition fees (guru dakshina) with the sole intention that this tribal kid doesn’t become a better archer than his favorite pupil Arjuna. Years later, this is the same guy – fully knowing his side was on wrong side of justice and morality, picked up the role as chief of army for Kauravas to fight Pandavas. Now – why would the award for best coach be named after this guy, who is known for NOT doing the right thing and being partial to his favorite student ?

Moving over to Arjuna – the ace archer. This guy is a hero only because his teacher (Drona)  and dad (King of devas – Indra) and best friend (Krishna) stacked cards in his favor throughout his life, at the expense of others who played by the rules.  Now, why would the best sports person award be in honor of such a character?

Politicians decide who gets these awards every year. Some choices are inexplicable when announcements are made. That is a problem that is not easily solvable – at least in a secular country like India, government should be smart enough to at least make the award not honor less than ideal characters from Hindu mythology. Can’t they be named after sporting heros of past? Or neutral names?

Please please pretty please

Are you sure you can make use of REAL TIME data?


Several BI vendors, insist that real time data will magically change the enterprise world. They may be right – I have often heard my customers echo that line too. But here is the question that doesn’t get asked often enough – what will you do with it, if information is delivered to you real time?

When world moved from handwritten letters to emails, there was a definite improvement in speed of business. But how long did it take, before people let emails sit unread in inboxes without acting on it? Same with twitter – how many people make use of real time information that gets bombarded via twitter? They choose to bookmark it somehow for later consumption. You can only deal with a certain amount of information – the rest is not useful, and often counterproductive.

This is much bigger in enterprise scale issues. Lets say you find at real time that there is a surge of demand in west coast, and you can make a killing by moving inventory from your Midwest stores to the west coast ones. Excellent idea – except – do you have enough people to pick,pack and ship in real time? Do you have 200 trucks that can show up in next hour to transfer the goods? Can your store systems handle such a load? Do you have people watching real time data stream in – and empowered to act on it? If not, can you realistically automate responses to real time alerts.

Getting real time information is just one part of the solution – even a small one at that – your ability to react to it is what matters more.  The investment needed to react to real time information is pretty significant for most companies.  Which begs the question – how many companies will make significant investments on getting real time information?

The alternate paradigm is “right time”. Well – sounds like a better  idea to me, except there is no one “right time” for everything.  For some one who does day trading, getting up to the second data is important – but for a rank amatuer investor like me, it does not matter much at all. Stock market decisions can be abstracted to “buy and sell” at my level. And I can automate that by alerts and automatic orders. I lose some flexibility, but feel comfortable at the risk level that I don’t mind. Evidently the definition of right time is different for me and a day trader. In the enterprise scene, it depends on multiple factors at various points in time.  And as business evolves – you could get caught up chasing your tail on what is right time.

Real time information surely has its place – I have no doubts – but we need to seriously think about what part of a company’s information needs have a “real” need for such information. “Actionable BI” is probably a nice way to describe it – but actionable does not always mean you get to act on it. It just means if you had the ability to act on it – you could have acted on it. BI does not dictate if it is actionable or not – your operational abilities decide that. In our extreme excitement about cool technology, and Moore’s law and all that – I guess we can all be forgiven for not thinking about the surrounding issues 🙂